‘I Thought My Last Hour Had Come...’

An eyewitness account of the atom bomb explosion at Hiroshima

By Robert Guillain

Monday, August 6, 1945, in
Hiroshima. A few seconds after 8:15 A.M., a flash of light, brighter
than a thousand suns, shredded the space over the city's center. A
gigantic sphere of fire, a prodigious blast, a formidable pillar of
smoke and debris rose into the sky: an entire city annihilated as it
was going to work, almost vaporized at the blast's point zero,
irradiated to death, crushed and swept away. Its thousands of wooden
houses were splintered and soon ablaze, its few stone and brick
buildings smashed, its ancient temples destroyed, its schools and
barracks incinerated just as classes and drills were beginning, its
crowded streetcars upended, their passengers buried under the
wreckage of streets and alleys crowded with people going about their
daily business. A city of 300,000 inhabitants—more, if its
large military population was counted, for Hiroshima was headquarters
for the southern Japan command. In a flash, much of its population,
especially in the center, was reduced to a mash of burned and
bleeding bodies, crawling, writhing on the ground in their death
agonies, expiring under the ruins of their houses or, soon, roasted
in the fire that was spreading throughout the city—or fleeing,
half-mad, with the sudden torrent of nightmare-haunted humanity
staggering toward the hills, bodies naked and blackened, flayed
alive, with charcoal faces and blind eyes.

Is there any way to describe the horror and the pity of that hell?
Let a victim tell of it. Among the thousand accounts was this one by
a Hiroshima housewife, Mrs. Futaba Kitayama, then aged thirty-three,
who was struck down 1900 yards—just over a mile—from the
point of impact. We should bear in mind that the horrors she
described could be multiplied a hundredfold in the future.

"It was in Hiroshima, that
morning of August 6. I had joined a team of women who, like me,
worked as volunteers in cutting firepaths against incendiary raids by
demolishing whole rows of houses. My husband, because of a raid alert
the previous night, had stayed at the Chunichi (Central
Japan Journal), where he worked.

"Our group had passed the Tsurumi bridge, Indianfile, when there was
an alert; an enemy plane appeared all alone, very high over our
heads. Its silver wings shone brightly in the sun. A woman exclaimed,
'Oh, look—a parachute!' I turned toward where she was pointing,
and just at that moment a shattering blast filled the whole
sky.

"Was it the flash that came first, or the sound of the explosion,
tearing up my insides? I don't remember. I was thrown to the ground,
pinned to the earth, and immediately the world began to collapse
around me, on my head, my shoulders. I couldn't see anything. It was
completely dark. I thought my last hour had come. I thought of my
three children, who had been evacuated to the country to be safe from
the raids. I couldn't move; debris kept falling, beams and tiles
piled up on top of me.

"Finally I did manage to crawl free. There was a terrible smell in
the air. Thinking the bomb that hit us might have been a yellow
phosphorus incendiary like those that had fallen on so many other
cities, I rubbed my nose and mouth hard with a tenugui (a kind
of towel) I had at my waist. To my horror, I found that the skin of
my face had come off in the towel. Oh! The skin on my hands, on my
arms, came off too. From elbow to fingertips, all the skin on my
right arm had come loose and was hanging grotesquely. The skin of my
left hand fell off too, the five fingers, like a glove.

"I found myself sitting on the ground, prostrate. Gradually I
registered that all my companions had disappeared. What had happened
to them? A frantic panic gripped me, I wanted to run, but where?
Around me was just debris, wooden framing, beams and roofing tiles;
there wasn't a single landmark left.

"And what had happened to the sky, so blue a moment ago? Now it was
as black as night. Everything seemed vague and fuzzy. It was as
though a cloud covered my eyes and I wondered if I had lost my
senses. I finally saw the Tsurumi bridge and I ran headlong toward
it, jumping over the piles of rubble. What I saw under the bridge
then horrified me.

"People by the hundreds were flailing in the river. I couldn't tell
if they were men or women; they were all in the same state: their
faces were puffy and ashen, their hair tangled, they held their hands
raised and, groaning with pain, threw themselves into the water. I
had a violent impulse to do so myself, because of the pain burning
through my whole body. But I can't swim and I held back.

"Past the bridge, I looked back to see that the whole Hachobori
district had suddenly caught fire, to my surprise, because I thought
only the district I was in had been bombed. As I ran, I shouted my
children's names. Where was I going? I have no idea, but I can still
see the scenes of horror I glimpsed here and there on my way.

"A mother, her face and shoulders covered with blood, tried
frantically to run into a burning house. A man held her back and she
screamed, 'Let me go! Let me go! My son is burning in there!' She was
like a mad demon. Under the Kojin bridge, which had half collapsed
and had lost its heavy, reinforced-concrete parapets, I saw a lot of
bodies floating in the water like dead dogs, almost naked, with their
clothes in shreds. At the river's edge, near the bank, a woman lay on
her back with her breasts ripped off, bathed in blood. How could such
a frightful thing have happened? I thought of the scenes of the
Buddhist hell my grandmother had described to me when I was
little.

"I must have wandered for at least two hours before finding myself on
the Eastern military parade ground. My burns were hurting me, but the
pain was different from an ordinary burn. It was a dull pain that
seemed somehow to come from outside my body. A kind of yellow pus
oozed from my hands, and I thought that my face must also be horrible
to see.

"Around me on the parade ground were a number of grade-school and
secondary-school children, boys and girls, writhing in spasms of
agony. Like me, they were members of the anti-air raid volunteer
corps. I heard them crying 'Mama! Mama!' as though they'd gone crazy.
They were so burned and bloody that looking at them was
insupportable. I forced myself to do so just the same, and I cried
out in rage, 'Why? Why these children?' But there was no one to rage
at and I could do nothing but watch them die, one after the other,
vainly calling for their mothers.

"After lying almost unconscious for a long time on the parade ground,
I started walking again. As far as l could see with my failing sight,
everything was in flames, as far as the Hiroshima station and the
Atago district. It seemed to me that my face was hardening little by
little. I cautiously touched my hands to my cheeks. My face felt as
though it had doubled in size. I could see less and less clearly. Was
I going blind, then? After so much hardship, was I going to die? I
kept on walking anyway and I reached a suburban area.

"In that district, farther removed from the center, I found my elder
sister alive, with only slight injuries to the head and feet. She
didn't recognize me at first, then she burst into tears. In a
handcart, she wheeled me nearly three miles to the first-aid center
at Yaga. It was night when we arrived. I later learned there was a
pile of corpses and countless injured there. I spent two nights
there, unconscious; my sister told me that in my delirium I kept
repeating, 'My children! Take me to my children!'

"On August 8, I was carried on a stretcher to a train and transported
to the home of relatives in the village of Kasumi. The village doctor
said my case was hopeless. My children, recalled from their
evacuation refuge, rushed to my side. I could no longer see them; I
could recognize them only by smelling their good odor. On August 11,
my husband joined us. The children wept with joy as they embraced
him.

"Our happiness soon ended. My husband, who bore no trace of injury,
died suddenly three days later, vomiting blood. We had been married
sixteen years and now, because I was at the brink of death myself, I
couldn't even rest his head as I should have on the pillow of the
dead.

"I said to myself, 'My poor children, because of you I don't have the
right to die!' And finally, by a miracle, I survived after I had
again and again been given up for lost.

"My sight returned fairly quickly, and after twenty days I could
dimly see my children's features. The burns on my face and hands did
not heal so rapidly, and the wounds remained pulpy, like rotten
tomatoes. It wasn't until December that I could walk again. When my
bandages were removed in January, I knew that my face and hands would
always be deformed. My left ear was half its original size. A streak
of cheloma, a dark brown swelling as wide as my hand, runs from the
side of my head across my mouth to my throat. My right hand is
striped with a cheloma two inches wide from the wrist to the little
finger. The five fingers on my left hand are now fused at the
base...."